Case study: Mood Pants LTD

Mood Pants specialises in designing and selling a very different range of quirky ladies underwear, humorously designed to match your Mood.

Aimed at the gift market, their brand is fun and embraces the eco-friendly aspects of business, with all of their packaging and gift boxes being fully recyclable and made with no plastic!

We came up with the idea of Mood Pants in December 2017, following an occasion where I called Zoe ‘Mrs Grumpy Pants’ as she had clearly woken up on the wrong side of the bed! This sparked the idea off for us where we could design a funny range of underwear to match your Mood."

As quoted by business owner Luke Charnley.

Luke Charnley

This venture kicked off with a few weeks of brainstorming to expand on their original ideas and the pair received some great feedback on their concept, so decided to really go for it! So they register Mood Pants Ltd with Companies House and spent endless hours, over several months, just sat at their dining room table developing new ideas for Mood Pants and working on their business plan, working out costs and revenue forecasts. Momentum for setting up the business continued and on the 24th September 2018, their website went live for pre-orders and they are now a fully shoppable website! They saw a market gap with Mood Pants, so they took the opportunity: "It felt amazing to know that Zoe and I were the first people to come up with an idea like Mood Pants. As we have both been very keen on owning our own business from a young age, we felt that this was an ideal opportunity for us to capitalise on and achieve our dreams while we are young, and also to make a future for ourselves. We also wanted to create a product with a large element of fun. A product that will make customers laugh, smile and enjoy wearing."

They were motivated to start their own business by individual influencers such as Richard Branson, reading several of his books and it really made us want to achieve business success like he has. Before Luke decided to become an entrepreneur he was working on becoming a full-time professional golfer, earning a golf scholarship in America which he attended for a short period of time before realising that it just wasn't for him. Luke plays golf to a high standard with a +1 handicap and always wanted to follow in his Dad’s footsteps of having a successful golf career on the European Tour.

Zoe was in her last year at sixth form college and a talented graphic designer, as well as an artist. She decided she didn't want to go down the route of further education and wanted to enter the entrepreneurial world of becoming a business owner. Choosing instead to education by partnering up with Luke to begin their own business journey.

The pair had a meeting with someone who worked at the Bedfordshire Chamber of Commerce and wanted to learn about all the advice and funding they could get for starting their business. They were recommended to and go and see a Wenta Business Advisor, so Luke then went and met with the Advisor and the rest is history! Luke stated that the business advisor had been absolutely amazing in helping them to get up and running.

Wenta have helped us massively with growing our business. They have helped us gain grant funding for our website as well as provide us with many key sources and contacts for our business success. We now have an amazing website www.moodpants.co.uk and SEO to increase traffic to the website. This will help Mood Pants to grow exponentially over the next year. We have attended several Wenta courses, including marketing and social media. We have applied these strategies to our marketing plan and so far, it has been going really well! The Wenta team has does an excellent job in educating us on what we need to do to keep progressing Mood Pants."

They found the marketing and social media courses particularly useful and are implementing a lot of the skills they learned into their marketing plan.

Luke and Zoe found the hardest part of starting a business to be getting products samples successfully made. In fact, they had to have their samples remade on 3 occasions because they were not up to the standard that they wanted. It was frustrating for them because the process set them back by at least two months and even had to reschedule their first product photoshoot because the samples would not have been ready in time. This was devastating for the pair and they started to have doubts that they wouldn't be able to get up and running in time for the Christmas gift-giving season and would miss the sales opportunity. But, they managed to get it all sorted and finally, the new samples arrived two days before the photoshoot!

With any business there will always be ups and downs but, for them the biggest highlight of starting their business has been watching their idea slowly turn into a reality. At first, they had no idea how they were going to be able to take Mood Pants to market, but with a lot of time, effort and hard work, they have finally seen their business dream turned into a reality. Whenever Luke and Zoe look at their products, website or social media pages they just can’t quite believe that they have been able to accomplish this. "We are extremely proud of ourselves and our journey so far has really taught us that if you put your mind to it, anything is possible."

They absolutely love being their own bosses and feel that it has made them a lot more independent and the sense of being in control of what they do. "If we work hard and efficient, we get good results. If we don’t work hard enough, we don’t get the results." They have developed a lot of good habits such as goal setting every week and setting themselves a realistic target to achieve every day. Luke and Zoe can’t wait for Mood Pants to grow and are learning more and more each day about the business world! As young entrepreneurs, we have probably learnt more in the last 10 months than we have done in our whole lives.

We are extremely grateful for the help Wenta have given us. Without their support, we certainly wouldn’t have come as far as we have done. We will highly recommend Wenta to anyone we know that wants to start a business. "